The blog FlowingData recently posted one of the best epidemiology visualizations I've seen in a while. It's animated, so you have to visit the site to get the full effect. A dropdown menu at the top lets you customize basic demographics. Then the chart animates with the distribution of causes of death for each year of life so far.

It's a beautiful graphic, and I love the interactivity. But what I really love about it is how easily it communicates the bridge between population health and individual health. Epidemiology is concerned with the former, but most people are really only interested in the latter.

Epidemiologists use aggregated data from populations to better understand patterns health and disease, but it can be very hard to translate those findings into information that individuals can use to understand their own circumstances. I like that this graphic drills down far enough to let people see themselves in the data, while still capturing the range of possible outcomes. This style of graphic would work really well for communicating other scenarios with multiple dependencies and possible outcomes. It's almost like a dynamic decision tree.

FlowingData has other graphics on mortality, antibiotics, and much more that are also worth checking out.